The Natural Order of Things (32 page)

Murder is one thing, incineration another, and it pains the old man that his students find amusement in the torture and slaying of so many innocent women. They would rather gamble on a human life than try to save one. Their logic sickens him: gambling is a ritual like any other, and all rituals demand that blood be spilled. So he takes it upon himself to set things straight. He has asked several boys to visit him this afternoon at the chapel, the ones who have been properly inculcated with the Church’s teachings on social justice and divine retribution—the pious ones, the most devout among them (the school still produces a few now and then), six brave young men eager to do the Lord’s work. To sweeten the deal, the old man has promised them a world of heavenly delights far beyond anything they have so far imagined.

Now he pounds his fist on the countertop and demands to know what’s taking so long, what’s keeping this woman, Miss Mahogany, Miss Madagascar, Miss Zanzibar.

“Coming right up, Father.” With a quizzical look she places the espresso in front of him. “That will be two dollars.”

He reaches into his coat pockets, but instead of cash he finds several pages that he cut from a book using a ruler and penknife. He puzzles over the pages, tries to unravel their meaning. A history of some kind? He reads aloud, enunciating each word as he might a sermon that he carefully composed for a high holy day:

Like a scholar who has just solved a particularly irksome mathematical proof, the old man slaps the crumpled sheets down on the counter and says, “Is this what you need?”

The woman pats his trembling hand. Her stealthy fingers pry at his soul, try to unfasten the latch to his heart.

“Father, would you like some help getting back to the rectory?”

The humiliation is unbearable. He glares at her, grabs the cup of espresso, and stomps toward the door.

The woman calls to him. “No blessing today?”

He whirls on his heels and shouts, “We sacrifice the intellect to God!”

Then he storms out of the café and into the ennobling poverty and squalor of the neighborhood where the sun swings across the sky like a pendulum through the dark dungeon of the world.

By the time he finds his way back to the chapel it is late in the afternoon, and a line has already formed outside the double doors. There are six women altogether, and at the old man’s approach, they crush out their cigarettes, fall into a reverential hush, bless themselves, wipe away tears of gratitude.

Hardly the type given to sentimentality on such a joyous occasion, the old man looks them up and down and scowls. How many times must he explain that it is inappropriate to wear so much makeup, to chew gum, to expose the tattoos on the smalls of their backs? “Tramp stamps,” the boys call them. Earlier that week, he gave the women the last of his cash and instructed them to visit the corner thrift shop to buy sober gray suits, formal hats, black flats—what he likes to call “church ensembles,” tasteful attire—but they are still wearing their usual street clothes and smell strongly of liquor. Not that new outfits would have been entirely transformative. Money will never smooth over the roughness of their speech, their irritable habit of using double negatives, their smattering of casual
fuck you
s and
ain’t
s. To insure that things go smoothly, he asks them to say as few words as possible. This isn’t a moral judgment on his part. Elocution is a tricky business. Even he has great difficulty with words like
homoousian
and
homoiousian
, the most consequential of diphthongs.

“Follow me,” he orders.

Inside the chapel, the chosen boys stand before the altar, their hair neatly combed, their ties straightened, their collars starched and pressed. They seem restless, nervous. Among them is Edmund Campion. He is first in line, his gawky demeanor superseded by a smile of such profound devotion that it strikes the old man as almost demented. What has this boy done, what sin has he committed that he feels the burning need to repent in such a way?

For a moment, the old man considers turning around and rushing back outside, but one of the women, the one the others call Tamar, blocks his path, and he understands that there is no escape. As he walks toward the altar, he checks his pockets, a repository for hints and clues and gentle reminders, but nothing more is to be found there. Vaguely he recalls something about legal certificates and that, by signing them, the boys have signed away not only their souls, which is nothing at all, for the soul is just a concept, a hopeful idea at best, but have also signed away their lives, which is the only thing a person ever has for certain, and even that is a tenuous proposition. The self, the old man now suspects, is an illusion, as impermanent as the wisps of incense that linger in the chapel.

Donning his white liturgical vestment and green stole—spiritual armor to protect him against any fiendish torments that hell might devise—the old man stands before the altar and lifts his hands. So begins the grotesque processional down the aisle. There is still time for his fellow Jesuits to burst through the door, time for them to drag him away and scold him like a mischievous student, but the church remains quiet and full of
anticipation, like a great stone fortress hunkered down in silence, its sentries awaiting the arrival of distant armies with their awful engines of war.

Nothing happens. God, it seems, has decided not to intervene.

Long ago, the old man learned to accept the terrible truth that he would never have a shattering experience like the ones described by medieval mystics, no startling flash of insight, no vision of Christ with His right hand extended in a gesture of boundless love, but this fact does not deter him from trying one last time to make contact with the divine. He bows his head and concentrates with all his heart and all his soul and all his
mind
, and suddenly the impenetrable veil that for most of the day has obscured his vision is lifted, and the world reveals itself to him with such clarity, with such unflinching detail, that he can only take this as a sign of the unequivocal goodness of His plan.

After pairing off the young men and women—the awkward and buffoonish Edmund with world-weary Tamar—the old man opens the Missal and utters the opening words of this most beautiful of ceremonies.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today …”

This is what they do to him, to the old man, after a lifetime spent in quiet contemplation among books of eschatology.

They parade him before the students on high holy days, not unlike the mummified thumb or shriveled toe of a medieval saint or mystic, an artifact to be revered as a symbol of piety, celibacy, wisdom, and dread. Recently forced into retirement, the old man is given the title “Instructor Emeritus,” an honorific bestowed upon those priests too ancient and addle-minded to continue teaching without embarrassment or scandal in the classroom. Though rare and often ritualized, these appearances are meant to satisfy his need to be among the students, his proverbial “lost flock,” whose intellectual curiosity seems to dwindle with each passing year.

The problem is just this: the old man, when given an opportunity to address the students, tends to say things that fly in the face of orthodoxy. The Jesuits believe (and have practically made it a matter of doctrine) that God in his munificence has traced an invisible circle around the campus, and all who enter this sacred sphere are, through divine grace, absolved of sin and henceforth immunized from the wickedness of the world. Here God walks in the cool of the evening, and here the serpent is rebuked and banished to the alleys and tenement buildings at the circle’s grim periphery. At the center of the circle stands the Tree of Life, and the Jesuits urge the students to gather each morning under its sheltering limbs. But if some of the boys find these clichés convincing, it is only because they are unaware of what life holds in store for them—they will finish high school, go to college, get married, beget children, grow old; in short, they will be miserable in a million predictable ways, and it saddens the old man to think of the myriad banalities and disappointments that await. Such a life doesn’t have a happy ending because it was never a happy proposition from the start.

Sensing their impassivity to their own fate, the old man dares the boys to sample the repellent fruit from that other tree, the one forbidden to them. With an admonitory wave of his hand and a loud rap of his cane, he shouts, “Wake up! Open your eyes! The overripe fruit has fallen from the branches and is rotting on the ground all around you. Go on, pick it up, taste it. For eons it has been fermenting, and its effects are quite sublime.”

He paces the room, from front to back, leaning heavily on the desks for support.

“Blessed is he who can understand a metaphor. This image of a mystical circle, and the invisible wall of protection it reputedly offers, is a fantasy, an obvious fabrication for the weak of mind and spirit. In reality the circle does not exist, has never existed. This must be so because God is all-encompassing and without boundaries. He dwells inside and outside any circle that ever was or even can be. And the same is true of Good and Evil, which, like God, are in a continuous state of flux and thus indistinguishable from one another. God does not walk in the Garden but swims in this protean sea of Creation. And all men, whether they are aware of it or not, flail about and gasp for air in its cold and tempestuous waters. You do and I do. We are drenched in it. Soaked to the bone in Good and Evil.”

Against their better judgment, the Jesuits allow him to finish his lecture, but later that same day, when they overhear several boys contemplating these dangerous ideas in the cafeteria, the priests, fearing a schism, an insurrection, a possible drop in enrollment, call an emergency meeting. In the gloom of the principal’s office, a secret vote is taken, and the priests unanimously decide that the old man, because he may have already defiled the minds of these impressionable boys, must never again speak in the classroom.

Keeping him away from the students—this is one of the many things they do to him, but it is not the worst thing.

Feeding, bathing, and dressing him pose significant challenges, but bringing him to mass each morning is particularly trying. During the Lord’s Prayer, he recites soliloquies from
Hamlet
and recounts the strange, eventful histories of Saxo Grammaticus; during the Te Deum, he whistles an Irish hornpipe and dances a slap jig; during the celebration of the Eucharist, he shakes his head slowly back and forth as though in bitter disagreement, or is it in stark disbelief? The Jesuits are never quite sure and are reluctant to ponder the possibility that the old man has fallen prey to the allure of that wine-drenched harlot, Heresy.

Despite suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and having lost a great deal of weight since the onset of his illness, the old man is still agile, more so than some of his septuagenarian colleagues burdened with the responsibility of keeping watch over him, and he develops a remarkable talent for sneaking out of the chapel while the other priests are deep in meditation.

For hours the old man haunts the city streets, a forlorn figure in black that can easily pass for a ghost, a derelict, a holy fool clothed in sackcloth and ashes. At nightfall, when packs of stray dogs emerge from their fetid dens to forage for putrid meat in dark alleys, the old man, as if by instinct, finds his way inside a corner café, where he chats with the lovely barista. After ordering his usual mug of Irish coffee, he makes his way to the back tables to commiserate with the luckless poets who scribble blank verse in their prodigious notebooks, play chess, and obsess over their personal failings. Though most claim to be free thinkers and practitioners of the more esoteric philosophies of the Far East, these men, burdened with years of guilt, feel an inexplicable urge to confess their countless sins, sometimes doing so in spectacular detail. They revel in self-debasement, which they mistake for virtue, and sometimes shed a few cathartic tears for good measure.

As he tries to judge whether they are deserving of redemption, the old man relishes the pleasant heat from his whiskey and the exquisite numbness that creeps through his limbs. A few sips is all it takes to liberate him from the imprisonment of flesh and bone, and for a few wonderful moments, he slips out of his body and floats freely through the café, a diluted presence, insubstantial as the wisps of steam that rise from the golden domed espresso machine and coil around the blinking neon sign in the front window.

“I dare say, booze is more magical than the Blood,” he proffers. Then he encourages the men to set aside their coffee and join him in a proper drink. He snaps his fingers and calls to the barista, “Whiskeys all around!”

The old man is incoherent by the time the Jesuits find him, his arms dangling at his sides, his jaw hanging open. The priests hoist him from the chair and struggle to carry him through the streets, slick with rain. At the rectory, they put him to bed and lock his door.

Keeping the old man away from the café—this is another thing they do to him, but still, it is not the worst thing.

In the morning before classes begin, some of the boys, the more incorrigible among them, loiter in the alley behind the gymnasium where they smoke cigarettes and sip from flasks and try to make sense of their teen angst. They joke about their sexual conquests and cast doubt on the wisdom of their elders, but when they hear the arduous scrape of heavy shoes along the broken bricks, they hastily stomp out their cigarettes and rehearse their expressions of innocence.